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:Twitter

Bill Sweetman from Yummy Names beat me to the blogging punch (not hard to do these days given my lack of posting!) and wrote a great post on a topic I had been thinking about for some time – the growing importance of claiming your Twitter ID. As Twitter continues its ascent into the consumer mainstream, and businesses continue to flock to the medium to engage with their customers and clients, your Twitter ID is fast-becoming a vital extension of your brand and persona.

Even if you don’t understand Twitter or don’t think it has a role to play in your company’s marketing efforts today, I strongly urge you to still secure your Twitter ID now. …I predict that over the next few years, millions of dollars will be spent by companies buying, selling, and fighting over Twitter IDs. I have already seen a number of nasty legal spats develop, and I have personally brokered the sale of several Twitter IDs already. And this is only the very beginning… If you are Acme Furniture, you should make sure you get your hands on @acmefurniture right away. Since there is no fee to register a Twitter ID, you have no excuse not to do this. Simply head on over to http://www.twitter.com and sign up for a free account. Don’t be the person who in a year or two is having to explain to their company President why you didn’t secure the company name as a Twitter ID. Take two minutes and do it today.

Bill also astutely mentions that if you fail to use your account for 6 months, Twitter will suspend it. While Twitter IDs are a use-it-or-lose-it scenario (not the case with domain names), at this time Twitter seems happy to keep your account active with very minimal usage ie, one tweet every few months should suffice. So if you were sitting on the fence about using Twitter, don’t wait until you’re done strategizing how to leverage this new social media juggernaut to grab your Twitter ID – do it now! via Canadian Marketing Association

It’s not a bad thing for the public that Twitter is better for breaking news than a newspaper; it’s just a bad thing for journalists that they didn’t create Twitter first. So journalists: Let’s stop complaining about the fact that we’re getting our asses whooped at today’s news model. Let’s just get on top of the next one. This round is over. Journalists lost. Here’s the good news: This doesn’t require massive firings that suck the life out of the print product, and it doesn’t even require you to sell your entire newsroom on these new models. Those who have been carelessly labeled as “curmudgeons” can keep their opinions of the Web as long as they keep doing what they do best: Supporting the print product that still pays everyone else’s salary. This works as long as you have others at the newspaper who are focused on innovation. Those people ought to be identified (or hired), given the space and time they need, then set loose to experiment.